Astronaut Dinosaur by Scott Listfield

Scott Listfield is an American painter. His paintings are immediate attractive with his astronaut placed often with pop culture icons. Indeed, he “paints astronauts and, sometimes, dinosaurs.” Below is Listfield’s artist statement. Interestingly, the muse of his series is heavily philosophical. It is through his social commentary from each of his paintings, in combination of the humorous and visually stunning art style, that Listfield’s work is widely received.

“Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was released in 1968, well before I was born, so I have no firsthand knowledge of how it was received. I don’t know if people really believed we’d be living in space in 2001, if we’d have robot butlers and flying cars, geodesic lunar homes, and genetically reconstituted dinosaurs helping or eating us. But from Lost in Space to the Jetsons to Jurassic Park, it seems that popular culture has fostered this space-age perception of the future. Generations raised on these TV shows, movies, comic books, and novels are now grown and living in a future filled with mini vans, Starbucks, iPads, and Hip Hop videos. In many ways, the year 2001 failed to live up to expectations. And yet the world today is peculiar in ways unimagined in 1957, when Sputnik was launched, or in 1968, when 2001 was released, or even in 1994, at the dawn of the internet. The present is in fact a very unusual place, and it’s strangest in the ubiquity of things we take for granted.